Sublime

In some ways, the distinction between normalcy and pathology is arbitrarily defined—as well as hard to measure.

If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.

If my mission in life had been reduced to being well at all costs, then the illness had won.

a lived experience that in some ways resists description,

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

the illness was not just my own; the silence around suffering was our society’s pathology.

One self disappeared, and a new, more dependent self emerged.

“My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air,” Gornick wrote in that memoir.